No Place to Be? Gypsies and Travellers in late twentieth-century England and Wales

Gypsies and Travellers have traditionally been sidelined from history, neither granted a history of their own, nor written into the mainstream. This chapter sets out their distinctive experience of later twentieth-century England and Wales, arguing that it was shaped by three key developments of the period: urban expansion and the increased regulation of space; the rise of ‘multiculturalism’; and the emergence of the voice and political actions of ‘the homeowner’ in the context of marketisation. Together these phenomena limited and shaped Gypsies and Travellers access to physical space, in the process constraining their political and social visibility and acceptability. Writing Gypsies and Travellers into our accounts of the late twentieth century thus reveals new histories and demands that we expand our understandings of the UK’s move from social democracy to marketisation to include the experiences of racialised minorities.